USA > Illinois > Cook County > Chicago > The Congress of Women : held in the Woman's building, World's Columbian exposition, Chicago, U.S.A., 1893 : with portraits, biographies and addresses > Part 62
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In Rome the success of this Spanish crusade against the infidel in Spain was cele- brated by solemn religious services and public festivals. Isabella and Ferdinand received from the Popethe title of " Catholic kings" and ever afterward Isabella signed all official papers as " Isabella the Catholic." In London the final news of the victory at Granada was read to the citizens in Saint Paul's cathedral by command of Henry VII. who went with his court to hear the recital and afterward attended the service of praise held in commemoration of the event.
After eighteen years of sovereignty Isabella saw for the first time her kingdom united and at peace. While she awaited the fall of Granada in Santa Fé, Christopher presented to her a memorial he had written to explain his theories in regard to a new world yet to be discovered and which he believed himself divinely commissioned to find. With all the resources of her treasury taxed to the utmost to sustain the war against the Moor, Isabella could not do anything but receive the Genoese sailor with sympathy and give him hope of future aid. She recognized his intellect, his ardent temperament and his piety, and was fascinated by the hope of spreading the Christian faith and planting the cross in new worlds.
Ferdinand, who was less enthusiastic and more cynical than his wife, called Colum- bus an Italian adventurer with impossible plans, and opposed any idea of aiding him.
Isabella met his objections by saying that Castile would be able when at peace to furnish the means for the expedition without any help from Aragon, and she gave Columbus her protection and a sufficient income for his support until the state of her kingdom should justify her in more active measures in his behalf. After once plight- ing her faith to Columbus, Isabella was his firm friend and gave him her most gener- ous confidence. His commission signed by Ferdinand and Isabella on the 17th of April, [492, named him admiral of the little fleet which accompanied him on the first expedition, and gave him ample resources for his voyage. Isabella's faith in him was rewarded. When he returned from his first expedition she saw those who derided his plans as impossible, the idle dreams of a visionary, hail him as a god, crowding the streets of every city he visited to do him honor, ringing the bells and singing hymns as if a great conqueror had returned.
Isabella proved herself as energetic in the work of increasing the temporal power of her kingdom as she had been in driving her enemies from its soil. After a few years of tranquillity, Spain stood among the first nations of Europe in commercial importance and wealth.
The mercantile navy of Spain numbered more than a thousand ships; they carried her work to all the ports of the world and returned laden with gold, to still further
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enrich her. Loyalty, picty and love of adventure were the most striking traits of Spanish character.
After the fall of Granada, until her death, Isabella's life as a Queen was brilliant with success; the glory and prosperity of Spain satisfied her patriotism and her ambi- tion, but she carried hidden from the world a burden of domestic grief and anxiety, that clouded the splendor of her royalty and at last caused her health, always good until now, to fail. Her mother, the loved companion of her life, became insane a few years before her death, in 1496. Isabella's sorrow was intensified by the fear of the inheritance that might fall on her children, a fear so sadly realized in the fate of her daughter Janc.
Isabella was the mother of four children, one son and three daughters. Theeldest daughter, Isabella, married the King of Portugal. In this marriage the Spanish sovereigns hoped to see Spain and Portugal united under one government. This hope was never realized, the young Queen dying in 1498, leaving an infant son who survived his mother only one year. The second daughter, Katherine, married an English prince, the son of Henry VII .; he lived only a few months after the wedding, and the King to keep her rich dowery in England married the young widow to his second son afterward Henry VIII. of England. She is known in history as Katherine of Aragon, the mother of the English Queen who by her severity gained the name of Bloody Mary. The only son of Ferdinand and Isabella, Prince John, was a boy of great promise. His education had been carefully directed to develop his naturally brilliant mind in the qualities most to be desired in the heir to a glorious kingdom like Spain. He fulfilled the brightest hopes of his parents by an early manhood, graced by every accomplish- ment, and dignified by a trained intellect and serious mind. He was married, when he was twenty years old, to Margaret daughter of the Emperor of Germany. The marriage was celebrated in October, 1497, with splendor befitting the rank and expecta- tions of the young couple, but the bridegroom took cold at one of the fêtes and died after a few days of terrible suffering. He met death with serene courage, and prayed in his last moments that his parents might feel his own sincere resignation to the Divine will. His death was a great misfortune for Spain, and the whole nation mourned with the bereaved parents. When Isabella was told that her son was dead, she bowed in submission saying, "The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away: blessed be the name of the Lord;" but her life from this time dwelt in the shadow of this great affliction.
The death of Prince John made Jane, the youngest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, heiress to the throne of Spain. She was married to Philippe le Bel of Austria, and lived at Brussels, but payed a visit to her parents, with her husband, after the death of her brother, in obedience to their wish that the future King and Queen of Spain should become acquainted with the country and its people. Philippe had such remark- able personal beauty, that the Spaniards declared on seeing him "that Spain had been ruled by men, but now it was to be ruled by an angel."
Jane was the least attractive of Isabella's children. She was plain in person, and her moody and irritable disposition indicated the insanity that afterward developed itself and gave her the name of Jane the Foolish, by which she is known in history. The only child of Philippe and Jane the Foolish was born at Alcala in 1503, and after- ward ruled Spain as Charles V. The deepest natures have the greatest capacity for suffering, and the agony caused by repeated bereavements seriously affected Isabella's health. In the autumn of 1504 she was attacked by a fever. Enfeebled by years of grief and anxiety Isabella sank rapidly under it and died on the twenty-sixth of November. Death had no terrors for her; after a life so full of action and responsi- bility the thought of rest must have been sweet. During her illness she was serene and cheerful, and said to those who wept beside her bed a few hours before her death, " Do not weep for me; pray for the safety of my soul."
Escorted by a guard of honor Isabella's body was carried from Medina del Campo to Granada. The peasants thronged the roads to see the royal procession, and sank
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on their knees as it passed, praying for the soul of the good queen. At night, when the escort rested with their sacred charge, in the fields or in some village church, the bier was watched by the villagers who, in devout attitudes, listened to masses for the dead.
Ximenes, when told of her death, said: " Spain has lost a queen she can not suffi- ciently mourn. We have known the superiority of her intellect, the goodness of her heart, the purity of her conscience, the sincerity of her piety, her justice toward all the world, her desire to give abundance and tranquillity to her people." This estimate of her character can be accepted as just. Her errors were those of her education and her century; her virtues were those of a great queen and a great woman. She taught her nobles that they were born to serve not to oppress, and recalled to mind the old law of Castile, "that a cavalier of noble blood should treat his vassals with love and gentleness." She taught the world that obedience to law is as necessary for the moral sphere as for the physical, and that liberty is the fruit of a wise government. In her administration she foreshadowed the modern tendency to seek redress for wrong by legal means, and order by perfect social institutions, and by this course she gave an unexpected movement to the march of civilization.
She sleeps beside her husband in a magnificent chapel in the center of Granada. Every year on the anniversary of her burial the bells of twenty-eight churches, which she built in that city on the ruins of Moorish mosques, toll in her memory and recall the work in which she most gloried-the planting of the cross over the crescent of the infidel.
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ADDRESS ON EFFECTIVE VOTING. By MISS CATHERINE HELEN SPENCE.
Among the many congresses held in Chicago this year, there has been one which has led to definite action, and focused into one point the discontent of the many and the aspirations of the few. A league has been formed for active propagandism by the advocates of propor- tional representation-what I call effective voting. It is not with me a thing of today or of last year. For thirty-two years I have written on this subject, and if any man had come forward to do that I am doing now I would have loyally helped him; I should have rejoiced in his successes and sympathized in his disappointments.
It is said that many of us women spend our lives in waiting for the coming man, who often does not come at all, and sometimes when he does come she might have done better without him. I have waited long enough for the coming man, and I as a single woman have had to take up lecturing myself, and, in point of fact, I have done fairly well, both with life and with lecturing. When I have been asked if I do not wish that I were a man, I have replied no, not much. I feel like the Jewesses who, when the men publicly thanked God because He had made them men and not women, thanked the Eternal Father because He MISS CATHERINE HELEN SPENCE. had made them according to His pleasure. When I have been further pressed and asked if I did not wish I were a man for the sake of the cause of proportional representation, I have replied that I am stronger in and for that cause as a woman than I would be as a man, because I have no political ax to grind. I have not even a vote. So I can occupy the platform of absolute disinterestedness when I plead that the men who are supposed or presumed to represent me should be equitably represented themselves. This can only be done in your America by escap- ing from the district lines for congressional and state elections, and from the ward sys- tem in municipalities.
Truth is greater than falsehood, and wisdom stronger than folly; and if we do not by our political machinery exclude the intelligent and the wise from our federal, state and municipal councils, these would leaven society, and make themselves felt in every department, especially in the political. But if from defective machinery or other causes, the representation is not really equal, and intelligent and conscientious min-
Miss Catherine Helen Spence was born in Melrose, Scotland, in 1825, and went at the age of thirteen to Adelaide, Sonth Australia, with her parents. Her official title is Member of the State Children's Conncil of South Australia, and she carries a government commission from the Earl of Kintore, governor of that province. She published in London four novels, "Clara Morison," "Tender and True," "Mr. Hogarth's Will " and "The Author's Daughter," and has written a great deal for Anstra- lian newspapers and magazines. In 1860 she began to write on electoral reform, adopting the views of Thomas Hare and John Stuart Mill with regard to proportional representation. In 1893 she began to lecture on the subject with ballots, show .. ing that the method made all votes effective, and her main object in visiting America was to advocate the breaking down of the ward and district lines and electing representatives by the single transferable vote. She aided Miss Emily Clark in the work of boarding out dependent children in South Australia, which has been so satisfactory that it has been imitated all over Australia and New Zealand. The industrial schools for pauper children have been emptied, and the children are kept in proper homes till fit for work. She has also been fourteen years on a school board, and is on the Woman's Suffrage League Committee in her province. Her postoffice address is Adelaide, South Australia.
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orities are shut out, the whole balance is overthrown, and party exercises a mischiev- ous influence.
Now some minorities believe that their particular reform will cure all evils. The woman suffragists fancy that if they have votes and use them they will moralize poli- tics. Will they? As soon as it is seen that the earnest, conscientious women have votes and use them, will not the party politicians, who are so eager to get ignorant aliens put on the rolls that they may use their votes for party victory, will not these induce all the women whom they could command, cajole or corrupt, to register as voters, and the result is that the votes for these interested men will be swelled by the votes of these women, and the adverse majority would be only the larger. Therefore, I have said all along that the woman's suffrage and proportional representation should go together, or the first will be a mere delusion.
The prohibition party believes and declares that universal abstinence from alco- hol in every shape will put an end to poverty. Will it do so? It is a question whether the whisky power would not be greater if the workmen could live on less and waste less. If he became a vegetarian and could maintain his family and himself for less money, unless economic conditions are altered, the result would be that wages would fall below their present level, and that the profits of capital and monopoly would be greater. It is partly because the English workman considers beer a necessary of life that his wages are at a higher level than on the Continent of Europe, and the temper- ate and vegetarian peoples of India and China are the worst paid laborers in the world. I heard a lady at the Suffrage Congress say to and exhort all good men to come to the polls and vote, and she asserted that it was on account of their criminal abstention that politics were so corrupt. But if all the good men in America were to exercise the suffrage privilege, unless we get rid of the present party system, that is built on the duel between two parties, and two parties only in your separated districts, they might benefit themselves by doing the duty of citizens, but they would not moralize politics, for this reason, that if one hundred Democrats voted, and one hundred Repub- licans voted also, they would not change the situation. A few wavering and corrupti- ble voters could turn the scale, and thus virtually carry the district.
I believe I should have a vote, and expect in time to have it, but it would be little pleasure to me unless I can make it effective for the return of one man of whom I approve, without neutralizing the vote of any man who differs from me, or wasting the vote of anyone who agrees with me. It is by the exchange of the competitive for the co-operative spirit in politics that they can be sweetened, elevated and moralized, and by the method of voting which I shall show you as an object lesson, you will see that each vote has equal weight, and that all are effective. It is so simple that a child of eight years of age by merely reading the " Instructions to Voters " printed on the back of the ticket or ballot can tell the result. As you see by the ticket or ballot, all you have to do is to put " I " to the name of the candidate you prefer over all others, " 2" to the name of the one next in preference, "3" to the next, and so on. So then if the candidate you prefer has too many votes or too few votes, your vote is passed on accordingly to the next, and is used and not wasted. Thus is the simple vote of Thomas Hare and John Stuart Mill apprehended by a child. The quota needed by any one candidate for his return is found by dividing the whole number of votes polled in the electoral district by the number of representatives needed. In the election for six poets to fill six vacant seats on Parnassus beside Apollo and the muses, the sixth part of this assembly who vote are entitled to carry in one, and not that half plus one should carry in all six, leaving the half minus one without any. This last is stupid injustice, but effective voting is justice, common sense and arithmetic.
All reformers should turn their eyes toward such methods of representation as would be just to the many and just to the few. At present outside parties are either lamentably weak or mischievously strong. They are powerless when they try to carry in an honest representation of their own opinions; they are strong when they sit on the fence and offer their votes to that one who offers the most advantageous terms.
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To give them their fair share of power, no more and no less, is the aim of effective voting.
The old parties of Republicans and Democrats have cach a noble record and some grand traditions; but in this breathing, suffering world, we can not live on a record or grow by mere tradition. Why shall the large, earnest minority of the Prohibitionists not have real representation? and if the Populists have a sixth part of the votes in a six-member district, or an eighth part in an eight-member electorate, why should they not carry in their preferred disciple as an apostle into the representative body? It is the same with the Socialists and with the Single Taxers. So long as all these are struggling for platform and their platform alone, the ticket is prepared by the caucus leaders, and the red-eyed corporations smile; but if all of these combined to demand equitable representation for all-including the Republican and the Democratic parties themselves-their strength would be irresistible, because the honest and conscientious Republican and Democrat, who submit to machine politics as a necessity, would be glad of a method which assures to the real majority a real ascendency, and to all minorities equitable representation.
Everywhere since I came to Chicago I have met with earnest reformers who desire to improve existing administrations of public matters, especially along the lines of poor laws and child saving. I find, that in Australia we have secured benefits which are not now in America. This is not because the Australians are more wise and more just than the Americans, but because you are thwarted and hampered by what you call " politics," which in that sense does not exist in Australia at all.
The taking of "the children of the state," as we call them, the dependent and destitute children, out of institutions, and placing them in foster homes to lead a natural life, both for the advantage of the child and the saving of public money, is opposed here by the politicians who want the patronage of institutions and who would turn out a good administrator, like the superintendent of your great Illinois Deaf and Dumb School, who really founded the institution, to put a Democrat in his place. In our changes of ministry, the only people who go out and who come in are the six responsible cabinet ministers themselves. The civil service has such security that even occasional vacancies must be filled up according to regulation, and the "outs" can not promise places to their adherents if they get in, nor are the present office-holders tempted to become active electioneering agents in order to retain the ministry, which alone can keep them in their places.
As for our municipal elections we only vote for mayor, councilors and auditors, and the political question does not interfere with these. It is character and business ability that are needed. Now, by your ward politics, by which the intelligent minori- ties are prevented from combining, your great cities are taxed heavily for work badly done or not done at all. Last week, within a stone's throw of the Windsor Park Rail- way Station, surrounded by great hotels having thousands of inmates, a dead horse lay for six days under an August sun, seen and smelled by every one Vain were repeated remonstrances to the police; and I was told that the most effective means in England and in Australia, writing to the newspapers, would be useless here.
Verily, you Americans are the most much-enduring people in the world. Professor Bryce says the difficulty of getting enfranchised from " machine politics" is caused by the essential conservatism of the American people. Social freedom you have, and the whole atmosphere is sweet with it; but this seems to blind you to the slavery of the party machine in politics, and to the neglect of your city governments to do the work you are heavily taxed for. No city in Europe or in Australia would endure what citizens in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Philadelphia submit to with noth- ing but private and ineffectual grumbling And let no one say that it is on account of the foreign element in these great cities that municipal administration is so cor- rupt. Who uses this foreign element? Who pays the money and who profits by the bargain? Who is eager to put the ignorant alien on the roll? Americans, to be sure. Americans who prefer the triumph of party to the good of state. Who employ these
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ignorant voters and votes as a means by which to win the stakes? When I heard in the Congress on Civil Government tlie comparison of the parties to gamblers playing for high stakes, I felt tempted to interpolate, " and these stakes are not their own, but the money paid by the citizens for honest work, and not for dishonest gambling."
Thus all that is faulty and mischievous in your American institutions depends on your majority or plurality system of representation, which has been inherited from your English forefathers.
I do not know if you in America suffer as much from merely local interests in political matters as we do in Australia and in Canada. The large electoral district will retain much that is good in local representation, and will do away with much that is belittling and mischievous.
You may say that this is a large reform, that it demands besides a change in the method of voting, a reconstruction of districts so as to allow quota representation room to play. I never said that it is a small reform. I have not given my life to tin- kering at old methods, old and imperfect, but for the sake of radically changing them; and I believe that if the collective conscience of America is fairly aroused, it will be strong enough to affect this indispensable reform. The Proportional Representation League is intensely interested and in earnest, and means to arouse this collective con- science, not merely to protect, but to act and to conquer.
Your parties are Republican and Democrat. Our parties in Australia have advanced beyond yours and are actually the parties of capitalists and laborers. It was when I first saw these parties organized for offensive and defensive war that I abandoned the part of an occasional writer for that of public lecturer on any platform open to me. I traveled all over my own province of South Australia, and addressed between fifty and sixty public meetings with ballot papers with the names of well- known political men as candidates.
The problem of our day is to devise some means of reconciling the claims of cap- ital and labor, and I felt assured that if these were pitted against each other in every electoral district in Australia as enemies, they would be embittered against each other, and it would become more and more difficult to harmonize their actions. It is by the admission of the best men of both parties, and also of representatives of outside parties into our legislature, that some modus vivendi may be found.
And there is an object lesson for America to be read and studied in Australia now. We are passing through a severe financial crisis, brought on by two main causes; first, the collapse of the land boom, which was always and everywhere a most mischievous thing, and, second, the steady fall in the price of our products. Not to the deprecia- tion of silver; silver has not depreciated. It buys as much of everything as we want to buy now as it ever did. But it is owing to the appreciation of gold, which makes our public and private indebtedness so much heavier. All the Australian colonies have this financial difficulty, but in the two colonies, New Zealand and South Austra- lia, which have had the courage to impose direct taxation, and, above all, which have taxed land values, excluding improvements, we see a wonderful difference for the bet- ter as compared with New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, which will not adopt such methods, but which seek to balance the revenue to the expenditures by increase of customs duties. New Zealand is prosperous and has a surplus revenue. South Australia has been deeply implicated in the misfortunes of the adjacent colonies, and she depends so much on the large silver mines which are close to her border and largely owned by her people, though they are actually situated in New South Wales. So the silver question is trying her greatly. But still she stands, and is increasing her direct taxation and decreasing her indirect. This plainly proves that a change in economic methods differentiates between peoples otherwise equally circumstanced.
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